The Escapist Bulletin: How the Cub Scouts might just save gaming

America’s Cub Scouts have added several new awards to their curriculum this year, and along with subjects like “Pet Care” and “Nutrition”, Cub Scouts can now get a belt loop or a pin in “Video Games”.

This is more significant that it first appears, because the goal of the Scouting moving – and this is pretty much universal around the world – is to help children learn useful, practical skills, be helpful and dutiful, and just generally become good people.

The Cub Scouts in particular also promotes doing activities with your family, and by offering awards for playing games the organisation is saying that video games are an appropriate family activity and can help a child’s personal development.

It’s unusual to see video games cast in a positive light in relation to children at all, let alone from a source as wholesome as the Cub Scouts. The pastime is commonly blamed for making children fat, lazy, or violent, to the point that sometimes other factors get de-emphasized or ignored.

Much of this negative view can be attributed to a simple lack of information, as gaming has grown incredibly quickly over the years and there’s more data than people can easily process.

Video games have changed more radically than any other medium, so it’s hardly a surprise that the attitudes of people outside the hobby have struggled to keep step. If your last exposure to video games was Super Nintendo, God of War 3 or Modern Warfare 2 are going to seem pretty overwhelming.

This idea isn’t a new one: the concept of “future shock” – which can be summarised as "too much change in too short a period of time" – was coined back in 1970, before there was an internet or cell phones or even VCRs to make it ten times worse.

The Cub Scout award, however, goes a long way to overcoming this future shock by being structured with a heavy focus on education.

To earn the belt loop the Cub Scout has to learn about ratings boards, and because Cub Scouts are so young, it means that the parent has to learn about it too. So in the context of doing something fun with their children, parents learn what games are appropriate and what games aren’t.

The pin has further educational requirements, like price comparisons and finding out about warranties and return policies, leaving a parent in a very good position to make informed decisions about their children’s entertainment choices.

Best of all, the Cub Scouts is an organisation that parents trust to have the best interest of their kids at heart, and these awards will mean that there will be thousands of families across the US whose experience with video games is a positive one.

Not only that, but there will be tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of young, enthusiastic and most importantly knowledgeable ambassadors who have been encouraged to have a healthy relationship with gaming, and honestly, they’re probably the best advocates the industry could have gotten.